Collaboration is creating together

Clay Shirky provides a brief and inspiring introduction to what collaboration is all about.

Is collaboration just another management fad? Readers familiar with my blog would already know that I’m true believer in online cooperation. Co-creation is to tap into the potential of the social web as a source for improving your everyday way of solving work challenges. How can you do this?

share your content with other people

tag the content so that other people can find it

allow complete strangers to modify your content

Clay Shirky, an internet writer since the early 90s, illustrates how collaboration is the new mantra and why it is so. His speach in the video above was held in 2005, but was recently posted at the TED community for all of us who weren’t present at the gig.

Shirky mentions two examples of how to take advantage of the knowledge already available online: First, the photo community Flickr and the social bookmarking community del.icio.us (both are Yahoo! companies). Both web sites allow users to help community members to find the resources tagged within the community. Both companies broke new ground in 2005.

Three years on and I’m still a great fan and user of both services. Why? Because social bookmarks allows one to, for instance, share useful stuff on the web with colleagues in a project. Flickr could be a useful source for illustrating pictures to spice up your power point slides.